I’m writing from my newly reconfigured office. I can’t tell you how good it feels to get all this crap out of my way. It is as if…and I’ve said this before – all the stuff on my office floor reflects itself somehow into my head, and my entire personage feels cluttered and stuck and dusty and messy. But when I get the floor cleaned up, put some space back into the place, get everything neat and nice looking and easier to live in, my world becomes brighter. I don’t know whether I allow my room to get that way as a punishment, as a corporal (really, because that’s what it feels like) punishment for being a failure. But that’s another topic, not one that I need to harp on right now, although…did I mention that Mary Vache…a really nice woman and a friend…has achieved phenomenal success (as far as I’m concerned), that she deserves it, and that I feel as a result like I should just put a bullet in my brain. It’s like I’ve…I told Reinhardt this week that I feel like God has abandoned me. That he was traveling with me through my early teen years, and once I got to the Ivy League, he began to realize that I was not his chosen one…or maybe he put me on probation, and by the end of that time, especially around the time that I started up therapy with you, he decided that I was not what he thought I was, and like all male mentors that I have sought out, abandoned me with best wishes and a consolation prize of a life. That’s another locution, expression that came out in Reinhardt this week, that I’m living a consolation prize of a life. That I am doing things that are ‘important’: raising a child is ‘important’: “It’s one of the most important things you can do in your life.” But it isn’t the prize. The prize is raising yourself; it’s not working and toiling through intellectual stagnation so that this little person can grow up to be just plain normal and that maybe, maybe he’ll get his shot at being The One. No, that’s not the prize at all: that is the consolation prize: “Ohhhhh, I’m sorry Joel, you missed the grand prize and you’ll have to go home with…no, no, we’re not going to leave you with nothing, we’re actually going to give you a son, and in about twenty years, he’ll have the chance at the big spin. Isn’t that wonderful? ‘You get to go home with the consolation prize of the possibility of being the winning coach,’ is what I’m saying. Good luck to you. Sorry things didn’t work out.” But when God says that to me, he doesn’t…he just turns his back and walks away, that motherfucker. He doesn’t give me the chance to tear up [i.e. cry] with rage and tell him how mad I am at him for having groomed me for this and putting me (he says he’s sorry; doesn’t he know that with all this high placement and…well, grooming, for the championship, I form emotional connections with certain outcomes? Doesn’t he know that I am now wanting, cannot stop wanting that thing that he…well he never promised me it, but he made me, made me, want it, and now I can’t stop wanting it, but instead of letting me lay into him about how inconsiderate, how inhumane and unfair he has been, he just says he’s sorry with a game-show-host eyebrow wrinkle of feigned sorrow, he says he’s sorry and then turns his back on me without giving me the chance to answer him. And I want to yell after him, “YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW THAT YOU HAVE MADE ME WANT THIS AND NOW I WILL NEVER GET IT. You can’t just send me back to the heartland of normal human achievement, like midwesterners on The Price Is Right, you can’t just send me back there and expect me to raise my family, grow corn for the rest of the world, provide continuity of the species and no more, you can’t expect me to go back there and be happy!” This is my Salieri moment, I guess. This is where I now…you know, I would love it if there was…I think God is a heartless game show host, who spends his afternoons in tanning machines and doesn’t really care about the prizes he doles out to some and denies to others because they are nothing to him. He does not have to worry about having or not, like Bob Barker…you know, it would be great if they made game show host salaries dependent on the good outcomes of their players, so that when players lose, the host loses. That’s…I wish that God would lose too, now that I have lost. I wish he could feel pain, have a handicap, a…what’s one of those…I remember my…one day I was running at the airport, and I had a cramp, and my grandmother told me not to run with a cramp because I would get a hernia…this was like one of those abdominal cramps. And somehow I have…I think I asked her what a hernia was…or somehow I got the idea that it had something to do with the spleen. I wish God would get a hernia, or a busted spleen because of my failure. Because I have depended on him and instead of delivering me to where I believe he had promised me that I would--, instead he has delivered me to here, and as a result…and because he has then abandoned me with a little shrug and turned away to go groom the next big thing, because…I wish as he turned he would get a pain in his side that never goes away, that as long as he lives he will remember the pain that he got when Joel Geller…when he failed to deliver on his promise to Joel Geller. I hope he remembers me when his intestines hang into his scrotum, and all of his shit now has to pass through his genetive [generative] area. That would be nice and symbolic: that the rest of humanity was tainted because God turned his back on me.

Deep breath.

I had – and this is something that I have thought about whether I would tell anyone…and by anyone I mean you and Reinhardt, and by you I mean you and everyone I know who is reading. It seemed to me significant because it…well, you know, usually when I masturbate (I’ve probably told you this already) I’m really concerned about mess. Isn’t that sad? I mean, I…masturbation for me has become this relatively routine activity that I do much as I would taking a shit. It’s an urge that builds up and then has to be expiated on occasion, at irregular intervals. Sometimes it’s a couple of times a day – fairly rarely, though I do seem to go through rashes – and sometimes there will be a week or more gap. And this at this point has nothing to do with whether I have sex with Persis, because as you know that has not happened in a while, though we’ve been…well, I’ve been making advances, asking her every so often if she wants to have sex. Most recently she’s been having her period, and though if we were totally hot for each other that might not get in the way, but when it becomes an issue of finding the time when the two-year-old isn’t around, mess looms large as a consideration because…well, it’s become this “thing” that time has to be made for. Anyway, so it occurs with somewhat random frequency, this masturbation impulse. And I envision it as this…(truly, I do; though I know it is not this, though I wonder what it could be based on the way it builds up and is then expiated, like I said)…I envision it as this fluid that is created somewhere in me, and the sexual urge, horniness, is in my blood, or is a chemical within my brain, and it just kind of builds up and eventually I have to do something about it because… I know that when I start fantasizing actively about people…and it is always one of a couple of people whom I know, friends of mine, never anyone in Ecksville…(I don’t know if I’ve ever been in a place that feels as devoid of eroticism for me as this little town.)…and when I have the opportunity, I go to the bathroom…sometimes it’s before bed because expiating the urge will help me sleep. Or sometimes it’s during my writing sessions so that I can concentrate on writing better, or just kill some time. And I’ll go to the bathroom and masturbate and ejaculate into the toilet with a minimum of mess – a couple of sheets of toilet paper better be all that it takes – and if the timing is right, I’ll even pee and wash out the track that way, and then I’ll pull up my pants (though they are never that far down[, if it’s during the day]) and go about my…whatever…business, so to speak. And it’s actually kind of important that you get the picture of my picture of my horniness right now being this…not really a burden, but kind of a physiological appendix, something there that may once upon a time have served some function but right now is just this ancillary structure that serves none other [purpose] than to flare up and get in the way now and then and that on such occasions has to be removed, figuratively speaking. And when it is removed, it should be done in a place that’s convenient and sterile and that disturbs nobody and leaves no trace behind. It’s a little sad when I write it that way, because I have clearly…what?...developed?...evolved?...this role of eroticism in my life that is well contained. Never a problem. Never impacts anyone. Sustainable orgasm, in the environmental sense.

Anyway, I bring all this up, because the other day, on Thursday afternoon, I hadn’t masturbated in a while, and as sometimes happens when the urge returns to me after a long absence, I am tempted to involve other things. Porn, typically, because that is not messy; and like ejaculate in the toilet, it can be put away neatly with a minimum of effort. But when I’m really getting aroused, what I think of are my dildos, one of which is a nice small carrot size that is entirely manageable, and one of which is this…it was really funny, the…when I ordered this out of the Good Vibrations catalog…I already had my one dildo, the small one, that worked just fine (and this was years ago), and yet I had the desire to feel something larger in me…and just so we know what we’re talking about here, not that there’s any real question about it, but by ‘in me’ I mean in my ass. And so…it’s kind of hard, as you can imagine…or, I don’t know, maybe you’ve gone through the same process…kind of hard to, like… Furniture you can measure, and then you can accurately measure the space it’s supposed to go in to see if it will fit as you imagine. Not so with an anus. You know, when you read these measurements – 1”, 1½”, 2” – it’s very difficult to picture what those would feel like, beyond having something that size to try on…but of course, if you had that you wouldn’t need to order one. I suppose you could, like, measure some carrots…but that’s ridiculous. Anyway, so I knew I wanted something larger, but I didn’t know how large, and since I was ordering a silicone dildo, and silicone is an expensive material, I didn’t want to get it too small. I wanted to err on the size of largeness, and so I ordered this thing that, based on my experience with the smaller dildo, I thought would be about the right dimensions to satisfy my craving.

Well, so the box comes, and I open it, and I take this thing out, and I swear, I remember it as if ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ was playing in the background, out and up comes this huge pink translucent cock that takes my breath away. I mean, I was almost scared of this thing. It was very amusing. And getting it in was not at all the totally pleasurable thing that I imagined, but it did present itself as a challenge, one that I was able ultimately to meet, and which has since given me a good amount of pleasure, though not as much still as the smaller one, about which I want to talk more and from which this little story of the big pink silicone cock is a little diversion.

So the other day, I had this urge to involve other things. And I had this idea that I wanted to use the smaller dildo (I hate that word. I want to use another word, and ‘wand’ has come to mind. ‘Dildo’ is another one of those…so many ugly words to describe sex: masturbation, dildo, what else?…just about everything…) Anyway so I wanted to use the smaller ‘wand,’ and I wanted to use it with no mess…which is hard because the wands take lube and lube is messy and it gets all over your hands and your ass, and if you’re looking to be clean, it’s a very very ill advised way to go (maybe I don’t need to tell you this). But I have this idea of, “What if I tried to put the small wand in, with a little lube, but not so much that it would get all over the place, and I were to put my pants back on and then, instead of being in the bathroom, go back to my office and sit down in my chair?” And I could masturbate there, my pants down as little as possible, with the wand up my ass and moving around nicely because of the lube, but me just kind of being there. It has the feeling for me of self-fellating, which I could do once upon a time, when I was in high school. There’s this idea of having your cake and eating it, too; and I’m going to resist the temptation to make some pun on that. It’s like having your dick sucked is always dependent on finding someone else to do it, but if it turns out you can do it yourself…it feels like flying in a dream. Maybe that’s why flying in a dream is always interpreted as sex…I don’t know. But masturbation, self-fellating, doing what I did the other day (because it was both indulgent in a ‘pleasure, found-object’ sense, but also clean [What I mean is that it was able to give me pleasure and to satisfy that yen of mine for involving objects after a long no-jerk-off interval, both without the mess that that typically entails.])…they’re all infused with this quality of bonus! (and it’s interesting that that word should come up again in this section…didn’t I use it to describe what it was I didn’t get in God’s game show?). Somehow, when you can do something on your own that you previously thought you needed someone else to do, or put more generally, when you can do something without the sacrifice that you thought you would have to make for it, it’s this huge thrill that always harkens back to masturbation and self-fellating for me.

Anyway, this is all leading up to the simple fact that I was able to do that[, that ‘what-if’ I had hypothesized]… And it was absolutely exquisite. It was unquestionably the best sexual experience I’ve had in a very long time, and here were the elements that made it great:

1) clean, yet involving the dildo…excuse me…wand
2) contained

…oh, I’m ditching this little joke. I could have this experience of sitting on the wand, moving back and forth and stimulating myself that way, [while at the same time] being contained in my pants, [and on top of which,] having it be clean because I had used only a little lube in my ass and had washed all the excess off my hands. And I was sitting in my chair…and get this…I was doing a sudoku puzzle on my computer. You know sudoku, this stupid puzzle rage that’s sweeping the nation. A 9-x-9 grid divided into a coarser grid of [that’s] a 3-x-3 of nine 3-x-3 grids. And you have to put the numbers 1-9 in the little squares so that each of the nine rows, columns, and 3-x-3 squares has the numbers 1-9 in them with no one number being repeated in any row, column, or square. Anyway. So I was sitting on my wand, my penis out of my pants and in my free hands…but my pants other than being open at the fly still around my waist (this was very civil; you could have walked in on me and I hardly would have been embarrassed), and I would arouse myself…and then I would turn and play some sudoku. And it was like I was teasing myself, making this experience longer, drawing it out to maximize my pleasure, which by the way was so much greater as a result of the involvement of the wand. Perhaps some day I can aspire to that holy grail of penisless orgasm…that is, orgasm achieved through anal (or prostate) stimulation by itself…but you’re a savvy guy, I’m sure you’ve heard of this before…although in truth I can’t imagine you having attained it yourself, given the way you schedule your patients. Anyway, I really wanted to talk about this and to say how exciting it was to have a sexual experience that felt creative and like a little adventure. And maybe it’s sad that I also wish I could have had it--…that instead of this being a burden it occurs to me as a lack…I wish I could have had it with another person…could have some adventure like that again with another person, where I feel like I am doing something that I haven’t done before and that, as a result of my having experienced it, makes me feel larger, freer, and more complete.